Mitigating the Impact of Drought on Inland Water Transport: A System Dynamics Approach

ABSTRACT In recent years, droughts have disrupted goods transport on Dutch waterways, causing production losses in the hinterland and reputational damage to inland water transport (IWT). As future droughts are expected to be more extreme, the question is how IWT can stay reliable. To this end, we developed a System Dynamics model to identify strategic leverage points in the system that mitigate drought impact on IWT performance. We adopted a broad scope to include the feedback loops (involving transport demand, transport price, fleet deployment, infrastructure availability and transport performance) responsible for the system's behaviour. We validated the model against data from droughts in 2018 and 2022. To mitigate drought impact, our findings suggest that measures have most potential when they (a) prevent a reduction in the load factor of inland vessels, and (b) ensure that the number of vessels in the fleet (i.e., the fleet size) does not increase. Our findings apply to closed transport regions, which implies that Dutch policies are only effective when they cover neighbouring regions as well. This strategic analysis guides further research into fleet composition, vessel dimensioning and sailing depth.